Everything has gone as planned. On Thursday 18th Feb 2021. The NASA Perseverance Rover, will touched down on Mars safely and sent its first signal and images back to Earth.
As humans start to venture back in to space with the view of returning to the Moon in 2024, then eventually moving on to Mars and beyond.
This paper [1] written Frank Tavars (from NASAs Ames Research Centre,) et al, raises some very interesting ideas on how we should about space exploration, but don't repeat our colonial mistakes we made on Earth.
Link [2] is the same link but using the paper code and the citation guide is below that.
Hopefully discussion and lead to some really useful feed back for NASA so as a human race we can move forward and explore space responsibly.
Thanks to Derek Caelin for posting a link to this to both Mastodon and Twitter.
Also included a link to the Mumbai university astrobiology course as there is discussion on *
Space Policy and Planetary Protection* which may be interesting.
One of the advantages of being a higher education student or in my case alumni is you get to join groups. I have just been watching a live webcast on the experiments that are being used onboard Mars rovers to look for possible indicators that Mars once supported life.
Exploring the Habitability of Mars
with the Curiosity and Rosalind Franklin rovers and Orbital Missions
I am not sure if there is a recording of this going up, but the link to a some more information is here.
I am currently undertaking Particle Physics but there is also a really interesting series of lecutures on AstroBiology I want to check out too.